Capitalists will literally burn the planet to the ground instead of just paying their workers
this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2024
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chapotraphouse
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And worst of all, only for the purpose of who creates the "best" crap generator (aka AI generators).
They don’t even need to burn the planet to the ground to avoid that.
They’ll just burn it down because they think it’s funny. Humanity will die laughing.
It's less that they think it's funny (or even think about it), and much more that the universal oversaturation of markets and their avenues for surplus-as-capital to be made active and productive (a necessary law of capitalism in order to not collapse, a component of capitalism's need for constant growth), which is further tightened by workers' purchasing power being in freefall due to suppressed wages in order to maintain profits, has made it so any slight opening of a new market is utterly torn asunder by the explosive rail-gun jet-stream torrent of backed-up capital starved for movement, bubble or not
but due to said saturation and capital back-up, usually bubble or inevitably made into a bubble just by the volume of hyper-invested capital that has nowhere else to go grossly over-exceeding the capacity of said market and the profits that can be wrung out of it. Which then causes an extreme oversaturation of supply compared to demand, which causes prices, and so profits, to fall into a cascading collapse. This will lead to many things, including further suppression of wages (to try to salvage lost profit) and contraction of markets, which as previously mentioned, are necessary and require constant expansion for surplus-value-as-capital to continue being made active and productive to stave off economic crisis and collapse. Rinse and repeat in the natural and inherent cycle of capitalist contradiction and its inevitable crises. This problem of total market oversaturation and capital having nowhere to go is also in large part where the root of the neo-colonial system of cyclical loans, debt, austerity, then more loans, comes from.
And worth mentioning it's not so much that they would "rather" engage in this than not pay the workers
but that capital needs to go anywhere it can be made active; and those who don't thin their costs as much as possible to maintain the best profit margins possible in doing so to reinvest that surplus as capital, can not compete with those who do, and will be ruined and subsumed by their competitors (those that even remain anyway). It's not a choice by the capitalist who has any other while still remaining a capitalist, because making any other choice means not being a capitalist anymore and being cannibalized by the capitalists who "won". They will never make a choice that ends in their ruin, and would have no material reason to, hence why they need to be not given a choice by an organized working class.
If only someone could have foreseen these contradictions and problems. Perhaps by forming a concrete analysis of capitalist laws and relations and the roles played within it by its constituent classes, then providing the world with a methodology of unmatched predictive power to expose it and awaken others in the working class to the inherently inevitable need for its forcible overthrow to overcome these fundamental contradictions.
FLOODING BANGLADESH TO GIVE YOUR SHITTY SEARCH ENGINE A CHATBOT THAT NO ONE ASKED FOR THAT GIVES YOU THE SAME INFO THATS LITERALLY DIRECTLY UNDERNEATH IT IN THE RESULTS 
THATS LITERALLY DIRECTLY UNDERNEATH IT IN THE RESULTS
below 4 ads. what a great and innovative economic system
The next time some bazinga accuses me of being "afraid" of treat printers because I don't cheer on their proliferation or humanize them while they're dehumanizing us, I may just say "yes, I am afraid of the worsening environmental devastation that you fail to see because of a fever dream of cyberpunkerinos waifu shit." 
Ulysses, I have to personally thank you for really opening my eyes to the tech rabbit hole. It really is the new fossil fuels. Especially as I’ve been listening to Tech Won’t Save Us for the past week.
I'm glad to have helped.
The fact we live in a reality where we probably weren't going to revert our greenhouse emissions, outside of some few but very notable exceptions, knew this was a problem though and spoke to our need to do something, and still came across a completely new and absolutely useless technology that will actually exponentially exacerbate the problem is such a profoundly cruel joke for this poor beleaguered planet.
The worst thing about this is we're going to destroy the earth to make shitty pictures and stupid nonsense articles.
I can at least understand cars and industry as they're kinda necessary for the vast improvements to quality of life but AI is just making things more shit.
I can at least understand cars and industry as they're kinda necessary for the vast improvements to quality of life but AI is just making things more shit.
A few credulous rubes might beg to differ if the treat printer says "I love you senpai" just convincingly enough (gotta burn that many more acres of forest!).
They're not the problem really. I empathize with those lonely enough to seek companionship in AI.
AI wouldn't be getting 1/10th of the support if business owners weren't planning on using it to replace entry-level jobs, that's why we're burning the forests down.
They're not the problem really. I empathize with those lonely enough to seek companionship in AI.
I would be more sympathetic for that desire if it wasn't so often presented in a contempt-for-living-beings format, as is often the case, including on this site sometimes. That misanthropic sentiment isnt new, but the treat printers have galvanized it.
Definitely, and take this from someone trying to escape the reserve army of labor.
You’d think America, where work is sacred, it would be an act of blasphemy for an employer to abolish work in certain levels. But no, it’s “innovation” and no one cares that entry-level jobs are a thing of a past.
sure it withered away all the forests and turned the oceans to acid, but for one fleeting moment we were able to poison art, literature, and humanity's collective knowledge for everyone, and doesn't that make it all worth it?
sure it withered away all the forests and turned the oceans to acid, but for one fleeting moment we were able to poison art, literature, and humanity's collective knowledge for everyone, and doesn't that make it all worth it?
For some smug bazingas that want a holo waifu like in the Bladerunnerinos, maybe.
Oh wow, their estimates for power consumption were too low?
Damn, why would they underestimate such an irrelevant, trivial thing?
All the tech capitalists have been subscriptionpilled and this is the result. ARR is god now
longtermist techbro whisperer argues that's ok because it wouldn't lead to complete collapse:
One finds the same insouciant attitude about climate change in MacAskill’s recent book. For example, he notes that there is a lot of uncertainty about the impacts of extreme warming of 7 to 10 degrees Celsius but says “it’s hard to see how even this could lead directly to civilisational collapse.” MacAskill argues that although “climatic instability is generally bad for agriculture,” his “best guess” is that “even with fifteen degrees of warming, the heat would not pass lethal limits for crops in most regions,” and global agriculture would survive.
also from 2023:
"We barely have enough water and you're diverting even more for others to use," says Yang Kuanwei, a tomato farmer bemoaning government water policies in Taiwan's southern Tainan county, where chip giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or TSMC, is building a state-of-the-art factory.
In 2021, an absence of seasonal typhoons left reservoirs so parched, chipmakers like TSMC were forced to truck in water to keep factories running.
For the third year in a row, rice farmers in southern Taiwan have not been allowed to plant their crops. Instead, the government is paying them subsidies to not grow rice this season, because it uses scarce water that semiconductor plants nearby need.
"When there is no rain, things grow at the wrong time," says Zhang Meixue, head of one of the local farmer's associations in southern Tainan county, once one of the island's prime rice-growing areas. "Growing rice protects the local ecology by locking in moisture and keeping ground temperatures stable."
he notes that there is a lot of uncertainty about the impacts of extreme warming of 7 to 10 degrees Celsius
Well - I guess the "uncertainty" is how fast we actually get Mad Max mobiles. I'd say more but I don't want to fed post.
his “best guess”
Planet-affecting decisions are being made by techbro manchildrens' "best guesses."
I used to think that in order to be in tech you had to be smart. Sure, intelligence =/= morality as there are many smart horrible people, but it still stings to see a “scientific” institution be so anti-intellectual.
I suppose in STEM, the S is silent.
McAskill sounds like someone who may have never been outdoors
The tech bro response is to say that you can’t stop innovation or pivot to fossil fuels and say “well what about them?”
or pivot to fossil fuels and say “well what about them?”
Boy I wonder where all the energy powering these data-centers is coming from. how that energy is being generated.
Sometimes I noticed they get super emotional over it and start pining nostalgia for something that still exists.
: “Hey! Fossil fuels are great they started the Industrial Revolution so we owe them big time, that’s why we must keep using them! This does not apply to trains though.”
They'd also be kind of wrong factually, because barring coal, yet still critical alongside it, what greased and fueled the industrial revolution and its commodity production was the mass-murdering of whales to the point of almost extincting every single species of whale on the planet (and properly extincting uncountable intermediate species that relied on whalefall or nutrient cycling because whales are keystone species) extracting and using their bodily compounds to make things like 'whale oil;' and we owe them more than we could ever give them, but least of all to not keep destroying the planet, fucking up the oceans (and making them so painfully loud it disrupts their ability to communicate and hunt and contributes to beachings), killing them with fishing bycatch and with commercial boat strikes, and non-arctic-indigenous industrial peoples who still hunt them. Which is all economics as always.
We only stopped (at least, to that level) industrial-murdering them after discovering the modern fossil fuels (petroleum et al) and realizing that it was easier to pull millions-year-dead plankton and peat and trees that got their energy condensed and liquefied because fungus hadn't evolved to break them down and utilize it yet
than it was to find the previously-numerous-but-now-scant beings (of incredible intelligence, complex capability, compassion, and culture [even among different speices], much of which was lost to their communities forever); who also sometimes escaped or fought back and killed people and made crews have to eat each other ("Whale attack" they say. Whale self-defense).
Destroying the biosphere so they can J.O. to an anime girl with 8 fingers.
Destroying the biosphere so they can J.O. to an anime girl with 8 fingers.
actually the treat printers are getting more and more advanced so they will convincingly have 5 fingers per hand, which is totally worth the extra carbon dumping 
Destroying civilization because I can’t be bothered to copy and paste from stack overflow
Now we know why Kamala spent so much time at the debate talking about natural gas.
So there's this conspiracy theory about the bourgeois being lizard people and climate change is actually them terraforming earth to be more to their liking.
I've never seriously considered such an absurd idea, but considering that we are at a critical time for climate change and their response is to accelerate it makes me think there may be something to this...
Step 1: Come up with our own conspiracy theories
Step 2: in a concentrated effort for the right to tell us how corporations would never hurt us, they inadvertently debunk all of their antisemitic conspiracies.